“No, you idiot. You’re going to make her fall in love with you. Then you’re going to ruin her with the truth.” Adrian says it casually, like he’s discussing the weather. “I want her to experience the same betrayal she inflicted on me. The same humiliation of discovering that someone she trusted was using her.”
My stomach turns. “You want me to seduce her.”
“I want you to make her believe you’re real. Make her trust you. Make her care about you.” His voice takes on a vicious edge. “And then, when she’s fully invested, when she thinks she’s found someone outside the Bratva world who genuinely cares about her, you’ll reveal that you were hired to investigate her family, and we’ll pull the trigger on the evidence you’ve collected. I want to see her face when it happens. You’ll record it for me.”
“That’s not what I signed up for.”
“Read your contract again. Section seven, paragraph three. You agreed to use ‘any means necessary’ to complete the investigation. This is necessary.” Adrian pauses. “She did the same thing to me, Tony. She pretended to be an innocent girl who wanted nothing to do with her family’s criminal empire. Shetalked about art and culture and building a legitimate career. The entire time, she was documenting everything about my operation.”
“She worked at Christie’s. If you were running illegal operations through the auction house?—”
“I trusted her!” Adrian’s voice rises. “I introduced her to my contacts. I brought her into my business dealings because I thought she was different. I thought she wanted out of the Bratva world as much as I wanted a connection to someone real. And she repaid that trust by systematically destroying everything I’d built.”
“What did she destroy?”
“My reputation. My business relationships. My position at Christie’s.” Adrian takes a breath, and when he speaks again, his voice is under control. “She filed a formal complaint with the auction house, detailing every questionable transaction she’d witnessed. She provided documentation, dates, and names. She claimed she was ‘protecting the integrity of the art world’ while conveniently ignoring that her family built its fortune on far worse crimes. The righteous little hypocrite. I’m going to enjoy watching you dismantle her piece by piece.”
“Maybe she believed in what she was doing.”
“Then she’s a hypocrite. And hypocrites deserve to learn how betrayal feels. You’re going to teach her that lesson, Tony. You’re going to be everything she wants—honest, protective, and interested in her for reasons that have nothing to do with her family name. And then you’re going to take it all away.”
I stand and pace the room. My hands flex, remembering the last time someone’s throat collapsed under my grip. Adrian would look good in that shade of purple. “And if I refuse?”
“Then you breach our contract. Which, as outlined in section twelve, requires you to return the deposit plus an additional fifty percent penalty. That’s seventy-five thousand dollars, Tony. Do you have that kind of money lying around?”
I don’t. The Berlin job went bad, and I’ve been living off Adrian’s deposit for the past month.
“There are other ways to gather intelligence,” I try. “Ways that don’t involve?—”
“Those aren’t the ways I’m paying for.” Adrian cuts me off. “I don’t just want information about the Kozlovs; I want Sasha broken. I want her to understand what it feels like to be exposed by someone she trusted. And you’re going to deliver that, or you’re going to return my money. Those are your options.”
The line goes dead.
I sit on the bed and stare at my phone. Seventy-five thousand dollars. Money I don’t have. Money I can’t get without taking another job, which I can’t do while embedded with the Kozlovs. Besides, men like Adrian don’t just stop at money. If I drop this job, he’ll come after me, and he won’t stop until I’m dead. Unless I get to him first. The thought settles into my brain like a loaded gun, comforting in its simplicity.
Adrian has me trapped, and he knows it.
The question is whether I’m willing to destroy Sasha to get myself out.
I think about her in the kitchen just now. The way she looked in those little shorts with her hair down. The way her nipples pressed against her thin shirt, and how I wanted to back her against the refrigerator and strip it off her.
She’s not what I expected. Not a pampered Bratva princess trading on her brothers’ reputation. She’s intelligent, observant, and genuinely passionate about her work. She came back to Moscow because her family needed her, not because she wanted to be part of their criminal empire.
And Adrian wants me to make her fall for me just so I can break her heart.
I walk back out to the kitchen. Sasha is still there, sitting at the counter with her water and scrolling through her phone. Her legs are crossed, and one bare foot is bouncing absently. I track the movement up her calf, then her thigh, before forcing my gaze back to her face.
“Everything okay?” she asks without looking up.
One thing I’ve learned in this line of business is that a little bit of truth sprinkled with a lie is almost more convincing, so I respond, “A former client with unrealistic expectations.”
“Sounds familiar.” She sets her phone down. “My brothers have those, too.”
“How do they handle it?”
“Dmitri renegotiates until the client sees reason. Alexei threatens to walk away and usually gets what he wants.” She takes a sip of water. “I suspect your approach is somewhere between.”
“Depends on the client.” Some clients get a negotiation. Some get a bullet. Adrian is heading toward option two.
